A little update: I've immediately and carefully decided to continue pursuing my career in aviation and out of nowhere, within 2 freakin days I already have an ojt, and I also decided to continue learning about forex market for an extra income. Thank you so much to everyone who gave me insights and advice!! It really helped me think more outside of the box and consider things that I haven't considered before!! Keep safe to all!
I am 22F, still don't have any first job and it kills me. So here's bit of my timetable: graduated march last year and spend months after reviewing for my board exam. Nov 2019, pumasa naman but I haven't planned anything forward from that point, because lowkey hoping my father would grant me his floating promise for me that if I could pass my board exam, pag-aaralin nya ako sa flight school wc is my biggest dream. He said yes..... but the money he had would first be used by my older sister (for her nz show money and stuff) so I was left waiting (but now not hoping). I decided to apply for a job pero jobs in our industry were first given to those with referrals.. or maybe I'm just not qualified enough.. So I end up studying again with a program aligned with my career pero boom covid naman. Bagsak industry. Tried to apply for online jobs pero they don't accept my application because of our slow internet connection na tinatry namin ipa-upgrade pero still waiting for 3months and counting na (is this a valid hardship lol?? :( )
Now I'm studying stock and forex market. I've finished most of the studying but now I can't help but to think of it more as, like, gambling and can't really tell if this could be a valid first real job where I could get income from kasi you would, most likely, also lose money because risks, right? I haven't even started trading real money yet because the funds will come from my father, and this, again, made me feel like I'm a burden (more like palamunin) in this house, like I'm 22?? Shouldn't I be working now..... I can't help but compare myself to my friends who works their asses off and earn 5 digits while here I am eating off of my parents' monies..
I'm really torn because I don't know if I should still hold on to my past industry which, as of the moment, is still trying to regain strength or move on and invest my time more on trading now and try to make it as my main source of income. Hoping for more insights. Thank you so much.
submitted by Warning: This is a long post. The down and dirty summary is this: Right now there are a few Linux projects focusing on bringing open hardware, software, and a usable phone for all of us Linux enthusiasts with 3 being Pine64 and UBPorts and Purism. At this point Pine64 and UBPorts have developed a very close to finished products and are shipping a final device within weeks. Purism, on the other hand, has had more time yet still hasn't made much progress and their device is still in an Alpha state according to many reviews. This begs the question, why all of the blog posts and videos promoting this device as being nearly finished when it clearly isn't? Read on to see all of the evidence why it seems clear that Purism hasn't been up front with their customers.
Privacy, security, peace of mind. These are the things that most everyone wants in their life and especially from their technology. For years now we have all heard the phrase ‘you’re the product, not the consumer’ and this is somewhat true. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff is a monster of a book but well worth the read. It lays out in great detail the end game for the surveillance capitalists, and it’s not pretty. Sensors in our clothing that tells the capitalists where we are and what we’re doing much like the accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes in our mobile devices send signals to advertisers and other capitalists our movements and positions. These technologies will eventually be woven into our clothing, which will be an even greater privacy invasion, unless you just start walking around naked. These, and other means, with which surveillance capitalists will be created to take our personal data and monetize it on an ever increasing level and there are only two ways to keep this from happening. 1) Legislation to stop the collection at its source or 2) Stop using the technologies that allow this data collection to take place.
Many people opt for 2 including me. I love using open source and Linux and one major data collection device has been for years the smart phone. Facebook, Google, Apple, and countless advertisers and data brokers collect and/or buy our extracted information and sell it to advertisers through these devices.
One platform seeks to stop all of this: GNU/Linux and the free and open source community with the many cell phone projects by Purism, UBPorts, KDE, Pine64, and a few others. As of late, it seems that the two best contenders are the Pinephone and the Librem 5 and it seems clear to me (and most everyone else) that the Pinephone and Ubuntu Touch are the pair to beat at this moment in time.
There has been a lot of discouraging news out of Purism lately and many people are speculating about how open and honest the company has been with the public about the actual progress of their phone.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this so I’m going to go over my own comparisons of these two companies and their phones along with the software and hardware progress of each.
Pine64 and Pinephone / UBPorts and Ubuntu Touch
The Pinephone developer edition (dubbed Braveheart) was completed and shipped to backers on January 17, 2020. The Ubuntu Touch edition of the phone, a close to, if not final version of the device, is scheduled to be shipped at the end of May 2020, barring any delays because of Covid-19.
Throughout the development cycle, Pine64 has provided numerous Twitter posts and YouTube videos. Through these platforms people can ask them questions or offer suggestions about the development of the phone. If you scroll through their Twitter feed you will find many videos and updates about the progress they are making on the Pinephone.
UBPorts has a monthly update streamed live on Youtube, along with lots of updates on their Twitter feed and their blog. You can also contact them on Matrix clients for live chat and other platforms if you have any questions.
Since I’ll be talking about specs next I might as well include the Librem 5’s along side too, rather than keeping it in the next section. For reference you can check out
https://tuxphones.com/yet-another-librem-5-and-pinephone-linux-smartphone-comparison/ Going through the specs and hardware I don’t really see a lot of major differences, other than storage space, with the Pinephone having 16GB and Librem having 32GB. But with both phones supporting SD cards up to 2TB in size this really doesn’t seem to matter to me.
The kill switches on both phones are implemented differently, and here is where I’d give the edge to Librem 5. The Librem 5’s kill switches are conveniently located on the side of the phone which makes them very easy to get to. In the Pinephone you have to remove the back cover and most likely use a tool to move the very tiny pins. While not convenient at least the functionality is there.
For my needs and in my opinion, I don’t need immediate access to kill switches because I’d likely keep the wifi off most of the time anyway, and with the Pinephone running straight up Linux I know that apps aren’t going to be relaying my location to any third parties. But if this is important to you, it will no doubt be a huge pain in the ass.
The memory is pretty much even, with the Librem 5 having 3GD of LPDD4 memory and Pinephone having 2GB of a bit slower LPDDR3 memory. The difference in daily usage I’d say is mostly negligible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MFpuDTiJU Another large difference will be the cameras that come with each. The Pinephone’s front facing camera is listed as 5MP while the Librem 5 will have 13 MP, which likely means the Librem 5 will have a much better camera. Unfortunately, no one has been able to use the camera on the Librem 5 to see just how good it is yet since no software is available to take pictures as of this writing.
Onto the software. I’ve been using Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 5 for about a week. I’ve been trying to use it as my daily driver and so far it’s been working great. Better than I expected. But it is suffering from short battery life. If I use it moderately to heavy (with chats, texting, and web browsing with Tor) the battery will last about 5-7 hours. I’m hoping the Pinephone’s newer battery and further software tweaks will help the battery life. That is really the only discouraging thing I’m not very pleased with about this phone. There are a few software hiccups on occasion but the phone is highly usable. Sometimes an app stops responding so I close it and open it right back up and it works fine again. Sometimes the keyboard feels like it needs some tweaks but overall works very well.
Librem 5 and Purism
The Librem 5 development models were shipped at or around December 18, 2018 (
https://puri.sm/posts/2018-devkits-are-shipping/https://www.slashgear.com/purism-librem-5-dev-kits-ship-bodes-well-for-linux-phone-20558700/) and on September 5, 2019 it was announced an iterative shipping schedule with each batch of phones being shipping over the coming months.
(
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/) The only problem is that the phones never came after this announcement. It was later revealed that the first batch of phones were only given to employees to test because of some issues with them. (
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/11/the-librem-5-has-been-shipping-for-a-month-but-not-to-backers/) But this was never told to the customers. This first batch was called Aspen. When you go back to look at their original post linked above on the shipping batches it’s been edited to include in parenthesis next to the Aspen batch “(internal batch).” Huh??? This wasn’t there when this was first posted. (
https://web.archive.org/web/20190905160222/https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/)
Next to the Birtch batch in the revised shipping post it says “(delivered on time),” the same with Chestnut. It seems to me like Purism is trying to rewrite history. It was never announced that Aspen would be an “internal” batch at all.
And this is where the problems begin with Purism. When you read their blog posts they talk about all of the software and hardware progress they’re making but when you read the many reviews of those who have been able to get their hands on a device the reviews have been less than great:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/librem-5-review-the-linux-based-smartphone-is-not-close-to-consumer-ready/ https://linuxreviews.org/Librem_5 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/ https://www.techradar.com/nz/reviews/librem-5 https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/librem-5-review/ This last review has been getting quite a bit of buzz…
The reviewer sums up the device he got with,
“Like many others, I really want this phone to shape the future of smartphones and mobile technology. On this showing, it’s at least five years out of step. Purism’s good intentions are clear, but the Librem 5 is a far cry from the quality of its laptops. More worryingly for Purism, there’s a strong chance its efforts could be overshadowed by the PinePhone, another Linux project that is far more affordable.”
Remember how I mentioned that Purism’s problem was being up front with its customers? Well, these reviews cast a lot of doubt about the alleged progress Purism has made on the phone. With this latest review from Make Use Of it definitely seems Purism has much much work ahead of itself. And presumably this reviewer got a more recent batch of the Librem 5, which was supposed to have a lot of functionality.
And this is at its core the main gripe I have with Purism. I am one of the backers of the Librem 5 and I have been excited about this phone for a long time ever since reading about it a few years ago. After reading their blog posts on their progress and reading other sources it seemed like the project was definitely a go and it was safe for me to plop down $700 for this device. Unfortunately it looks like either the phone I will be getting won’t work very well or I won’t get one at all.
It’s been long suspected that Purism is in financial trouble and is merely blogging away trying to convince people who don’t know any better to part ways with hundreds of dollars in an attempt to gain more revenue and maybe – eventually - ship something to those who paid for the device.
This revealing review really puts all of these events into perspective. It is with the former CTO of Purism Zlatan Todoric. (
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-Todoric-Interview)
From the interview:
“I saw that Reddit exploded around revolt inside Purism and a lot of my name in it - I was not part of that group as I already have left before that but yes, they raised concerns and they all got fired. Purism is a not in a good shape and it was already in bad internally at the time I left. One example is inflating the numbers of Librem One campaign which I think Alan Pope noticed and called them out.”
According to this person it seems that the issue is the CEO Todd:
“From there on we added sales person, support person, a sysadmin and started to look more serious while getting some traction with shipping. This was big deal, because Purism was almost two years behind shipping devices to most of customers and people were getting angry, totally understandable. We worked day and night but Todd's partner (the company in South San Francisco that assembles Librems and also is man in the middle for China were all parts get produced and then shipped to California) were being mostly silent to us. Even with this disadvantage we somehow managed in getting financial surplus for months so we added a wordsmith, a wizard with words to make our website more clear, less false and inline with our true nature (at least what we believed was). He also had this friend which I interviewed and he ended up doing the famous Coreboot port which brought big plus in PR for us. Our salaries started raising, we added couple of more people and things started to look good. We even talked to Todd and became Social Purpose Corporation. Yay the good times.
During this exact same time, Todd was mostly silent, hardly anyone would have contact with him but he was hiring and firing, mostly financial people, on weekly basis. So Purism at the time of Coreboot dev hire, was only built by people who I hired and myself. That was the first time that things felt smelly, but hey, we were developing great things here, the atmosphere was great and people were happy. We even started to gather and foster some community around us.
Around this time Todd started to get more engaged and started to micromanage people with a lot of meetings, a lot of talking on his side but they were and probably still are very one-sided and unrealistic. "We will announce this and that, we must maintain this growth and grow even bigger because we need investments etc" on which we pushed back regularly saying this things are not only unrealistic but also will harm our relations with public because we can't keep such promises. The end results was we were always trying to do damage control and things became stressful. Couple of more people joined but then it started to go down.
Todd talked about phone project, I did a year earlier research on it (with the help of community) and we came with possible hardware direction but I also laid out financial and time plans for such project. Entire group was on board with this (which was "no, we are not ready"), except Todd who just said that we are doing it in a month and we are starting one way or another that phone campaign.
This was very stressful time. Entire paychecks were cut during campaign for several people (including me, though later repaid us and kept promises on bonuses) and the campaign was going bad (as most of us predict) but then [Klumpp] and I talked about getting KDE community involved as they had Plasma Mobile which was pragmatic way to look at as phone OS base and Todd agreed that we contact them and make deal with them. There needs to be noted that Todd was for Plasma Mobile at that time, but then maybe and then seemingly not in the end. Anyway, this was a good decision and we gained traction, and on wings of that Todd went getting more PR momentum with GNOME, later also Matrix and Monero. THE MOAR THE BETTER! :)
I did ask several times how he got to that specific number ($1.5mil bucks for phone project) and that we can do it in such short time. There was never a single answer that made sense and only one answer actually ever "it will be $300 per device and some company said they would do it even if we hit only 5000 devices". You need to realize this was before we even knew what materials we will use, how the phone will look and so on. So vapor all the way. Counting the investments and that it is already almost a year behind the schedule, I hate to say it really but "I was right". I am truly sad with all this.
The campaign ended inside the goal, I gave up my bonus to be split between two employees with lowest salaries and we got people to create a phone team. From here on, there was basically two Purism groups, the old ones with me and the phone group who had almost no interactions with us and this was done on purpose. Things became more stressful on daily basis and tensions started to rise up...Coreboot developer left and in next week or two they were changing even more the contracts and the pressure was higher and higher (my salary was halved already for half year as well to put more pressure) so I made to myself clear - while I really do my best to help phone project, I very much disagree with it on many levels and the stress was just piling on all sides (I was basically working 18 hours a day for almost 3 years to make Purism what it is) so I gave my resignation.”
This seems to be the exact same pattern. Todd just jumps into things without thinking about or planning anything and then he just “blogs into oblivion” with – essentially - propaganda:
“Q: What are your views on how the Librem 5 has come about as of the current "Aspen" batch with the information that is publicly available?
A: The information from Purism is just bonkers regarding this project. Todd's tactic is too just blog into oblivion when you are not ready for something so you put spotlight somewhere else. The phone is not remotely ready, it will have proprietary blobs (otherwise it will not be ready for another decade) but, maybe this will be weird to some, I still have hopes that hardware wise it will be okayish maybe next year. The true questions is, will there be Purism next year. Regarding software, I am a GNOME users, but going GTK is just wrong decision, it is not on pair with Qt in this space and how Purism ended choosing this is even more sad story but for some other day. So much mixed feelings here to be honest but I will let users to decide what they want to gamble on.”
“Q: What were some of the biggest issues being the "under-dog" organization in the competitive laptop/hardware space?
A: Not having leverage in China. Quantities matter there and getting only dozen or couple of hundred orders per month doesn't really help. That said, the Librems are heavily overpriced but that is because Purism seemingly never tried to get better deal and the South San Francisco partner abused this so that is why Purism Librems are double the price they should be. I believe that if we had more realistic prices, it would be much better for Purism not only financially but also more talking about it, more of it in wild which in turn means much more orders, more happy customers etc. The innovation is not really that hard in this space because big players don't try to really innovate as they have strong positions, so it wouldn't be that hard to be good or better then most of big players even, but quantity leverage is hard to pass by.”
When confronted with these facts Purism fanboys spam critics and make the most absurd arguments and excuses. It’s really interesting to watch the psychology of it all. It’s like sports teams or religion. They’ve staked their position and they’re not budging even if their arguments are contradictory and are not in line with the facts.
Take one prominent Purism fanboy who I’ve seen reply to many criticisms of Purism and Librem 5 on the YouTube page of that Make Use Of video review (
https://youtu.be/NV0RnWorPpQ) and many, many comments on Reddit. His own review of the Librem 5 and Pinephone can be found here:
https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2019/12/01/decide-pinephone-vs-librem-5/ His review is what inspired me to write mine.
One of the myths that seems to be continually repeated about the Pinephone is that it’s not as open as the Librem 5, but isn’t true. For example.
Amos writes,
“There is also no way to separately cut the circuit to the GNSS while using the cellular modem, so the proprietary firmware for the modem potentially has access to geolocation data. The Pinephone will likely be more secure than 99% of Android phones on the market, but if security and privacy is your highest priority, then the Librem 5 is probably the phone that you want to buy.”
If you read Pine64’s blog on the openness of their device they state
“The LTE modem on the PinePhone is a ‘black box’, and runs its own Linux system internally. This includes all the proprietary modules (blobs) needed to run the actual cellular radios. However, this system is almost entirely isolated from the main system running on the A64 SoC. The only data contacts between A64 and modem are USB connection for data and I2S connection for audio. All data going in or out of the modem must go over these connections.”
To further illustrate the mindless fanboyishness (is that even a word?) of many in the Librem camp someone named William Karlsson made the comment: “Another reason to pick librem is simply because pine has only community support. In other words, no support”
I’m sorry but my first thought is: what the hell?! What is this person talking about? Linux and open source is ALL ABOUT COMMUNITY and that community HELPING ONE ANOTHER! If you want to look at how absurd this comment is just think about this. UBPorts is a community effort as is the Pinephone. Purism doesn’t seem to engage with the community nearly as much… and look at the progress of both by comparison! I’ll tell you right now I’ve gotten more help from the Linux community within the 5 years I’ve been using Linux with the 15 years that I was using Windows. I even had a tech support guy hang up on me when I only asked him a simple question about my Windows computer! The Linux community is by and large a wonderful and helpful bunch.
I’m confused by Amos’s comment about software development between the Librem 5 and other Linux on phone projects:
“The PinePhone will offer the choice of many operating systems and interfaces, since it works with many different communities to port their software to the device….One of the goals of PINE64 is to be a “community platform” that works with open source communities to provide hardware for their software projects….
The upside of this approach is that PINE64 doesn’t have to develop the software, so it can save on the cost of developing the phone and it can pass those savings onto consumers. The downside to this approach is that PINE64 doesn’t have as many programmers on staff as Purism to resolve hard software bugs and provide the same kind of customization and polish to its software.
On the other hand, UBports, KDE Plasma Mobile and the Android Open Source Project used by Replicant already have very good interfaces, whereas Purism is having to create its mobile interface for Wayland + GTK from scratch. In the short term, the software that Purism is developing in Phosh, Phoc, libhandy, Squeekboard, Chats, Calls, etc. probably will be cruder and require more work than the software available on the PinePhone. However, in the long term, we can expect the software to be better customized for the Librem 5 than for the PinePhone.”
Amos makes it sound as if the reason Purism’s Librem 5 costs so much is because of the hard work being done on the software front, but as the interview with Zlatan Todoric noted it was the lack of planning that caused the Librem 5’s to cost “double the price they should be.”
Amos writes:
“On a practical level, it can be argued that there isn’t much difference between the PinePhone which only has one binary blob for the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth in the /lib/firmware directory, and the Librem 5 which has one binary blob for the DDR PHY stored in a separate memory chip. However, Purism is going out and finding hardware manufacturers that are willing to work with Purism so their components can run on free software.”
No, there isn’t much difference at all between the Librem 5 and Pinephone regarding the openness of the hardware. They both use blobs for the modem, however, it looks like Purism got around to getting open hardware for their Bluetooth and Wifi.
In this next section Amos contradicts himself:
“Purism has received a lot of criticism from the community for not being transparent. Purism has opened itself up to this criticism because it says “we have decided to bring our community and customers along with us for the Librem 5 journey, and have been transparent about our progress from the beginning.” Purism is more transparent than most other hardware companies. Purism employees regularly answer questions on the company’s forum and the ongoing work can be checked by going to source.puri.sm and by readings its public bug reports. Purism posts monthly updates about its upstream commits to the Linux kernel, wlroots, GTK and GNOME applications. The schematics files for the Dev Kit can be downloaded and opened in KiCAD. It is easy to keep tabs on Purism’s work by downloading its images for the Librem 5 and running them on your PC in Qemu to check its progress in the software.
However, Purism hasn’t always been very transparent about giving its backers a realistic timeline when the phone will be ready and informing them about the current problems in the phone. Purism was heavily criticized online when it posted on October 16 that its Aspen batch of the Librem 5 was shipping and “in the wild”, but nobody in the community received the phone. Six days later, Purism tooted on October 22 that it had only sent the Aspen batch to its employees and people affiliated with the company due to the bugs that it had encountered. I frankly think that the critics on Reddit’s
Purism are blowing this incident wildly out of proportion with their accusations that Purism was deliberately trying to deceive to them. Nonetheless, Purism does deserve a fair amount of criticism for leading many of its backers to believe that the phone would be ready in Q3 of 2019, when it knew that the phone wouldn’t be ready to ship to the general public until Q2 of 2020.”
First he tells you that Purism “has opened itself up to this criticism because it says ‘we have decided to bring our community and customers along with us for the Librem 5 journey, and have been transparent about our progress from the beginning.’ Purism is more transparent than most other hardware companies.”
But then in the next paragraph explains how Purism “hasn’t always been very transparent about giving its backers a realistic timeline when the phone will be ready and informing them about the current problems in the phone.”
Well, which is it? Have they been super open, taking their customers on this “journey,” telling them everything that’s going on with the development with the phone? No, obviously not, and Amos even admits as such! What the….???
Take a look at Purism’s blog posts, their YouTube channel, and Twitter. A lot of what you see are pleas to buy their phone (which doesn’t seem to be nearly ready to be used by anyone yet) or you get puff pieces that show you a few seconds of the phone in action without really showing it to you. It’s like a magician’s trick. Here is an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzFLygkwWXM But if you look at all of the reviews of the software and hardware they all will tell you that this is pretty much in an Alpha state at the moment, but by just reading what Pursm tells you you’ll never know that. That’s deceptive. And Purism has been deceptive from the beginning. It was from reading their blogs about their progress that made me want to put so much money down for an open phone that I have wanted so badly for so long. Unfortunately it looks like either it won’t happen or it will but not for a lot longer than Purism tells its customers. I finally decided to ask for a refund once it seemed clear that the phone wasn’t going to be ready when they said. I figured I could buy the phone again once it was completely finished at a later date. But I was refused a refund based on what sounds like nonsense about my order needing to be ready to ship before I can get a refund.
I remember reading that their refund policy stated that they will issue full refunds for any order not yet shipped. It said that on their website, but they have since changed it.:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200104172759/https://puri.sm/policies/ Return policy
- If, for any reason, you want to cancel your order before it was shipped, we will issue a full refund.
- If there is a defective hardware component, we’ll send you a replacement part or a new product unit free of charge (see Warranty #2 and #3).
- If you want to return a product that doesn’t have any hardware issues, we’ll charge a 10% restocking fee. We accept these returns within 30 days of delivery
(dated January 4, 2020)
Their new policy states:
Return policy
- If, for any reason, you want to cancel your order before it was shipped, we will issue a full refund.
- If you want to cancel an order for products that are in the process of crowdfunding or pre-order, we will issue a full refund once the crowdfunding/pre-order of the product is completed and all pre-orders are shipped.
- If there is a defective hardware component, we will send you a replacement part or a new product unit free of charge (see Warranty #2 and #3).
Many people are wondering if they are short on cash and don’t have the ability right now to offer refunds so they are “closing the gates” so to speak because I have seen on Reddit others having the same issue:
https://www.reddit.com/Purism/comments/fgvvsn/purism_is_now_refusing_to_issue_librem_5_preorde In the following link (
https://www.reddit.com/Purism/comments/gbc4fi/risking_your_privacy_is_more_fun_than_the_librem_5/) Amos pretty much spams the thread giving some absurd excuse about batches when the Make Use of Librem 5 review is discussed:
“This reviewer seems to be totally unaware that he is reviewing the Chestnut development batch, and the general public will be getting the Evergreen batch which isn't scheduled to start shipping until mid-August. It is ridiculous to do a review of a development version of a phone as if it is the final product, which is what this reviewer did.”
I’m sorry, but Purism has been working on this phone for over a year and during that time they said that each batch would get closer and closer to a finished device but there doesn’t seem to be much improvement at all. The next major batch due out is supposed to be the Dogwood batch and then Evergreen, the final finished version of the device. But with the issues they are having how can they possibly have Evergreen ready when they say? I highly doubt even their pushed back date of mid-August it will be ready. In Purim’s original blog post about the improvements of each batch they said that Chestnut would have “Birch + final setup, improved web browsing, improved power management.” With Dogwood: “Chestnut + core apps improved, additional applications, refined graphical PureOS Store.”
This is yet to be seen on any device. More applications? I haven’t seen any, other than the standard ones for the phone, like calls, texts, browsing, etc. Where are the improvements that are said to be seen in each batch?
I know I haven’t gone easy on Purism. I know that there are a lot of hard working people earnestly working on this device and are doing their best to get it ready for the Linux community, but in all honesty they are just shooting themselves in the foot sending out these prototype phones to be reviewed, when they say in their press reports about how much progress they’re making. It just doesn’t add up. And that frustrates me. I sincerely want Purism to succeed with the Librem 5 but it frustrates me to no end with the continuous deceptive behavior of this company.
Amos says:
“Purism gets criticized in part because it sets very ambitious goals, and then can’t meet those goals in the time frame that it has set with the resources that it has. Because the company isn’t always forthcoming when it can’t meet its deadlines, it gets a lot of public criticism. As a programmer, I am amazed by what Purism has managed to do with such a small development team, but the scope of what the company is trying to do and its lack of experience make delays inevitable. The fundamental question to ask is whether you agree with the company’s mission and have the luxury of helping to finance that mission.”
Purism should rightly be criticized for it’s deceptive marketing and not being fully open as they should be given their status as a SPC. Plus their very name: Purism. Their actions betray every principle that they stand for. And as paying customers its our right and duty to hold them accountable. It shouldn't be any other way. What astounds me are fan boys like Amos here, who continually defend this company for lying to their customers and what they are paying for. That’s disgusting.
I know and totally understand Amos’s and everyone who wants Purism to succeed. I want them to succeed and have a great product. But I also want them to be up front and honest with their paying customers. After all, if it weren’t for us they would have gone under a long time ago…. And yet despite all that loyalty how are their customers treated? Think about that!
There is nothing wrong with coming clean and letting everyone know what problems there are. The delays aren’t the problem. I and everyone else just want Purism to be up front with us. That’s all. And as a self proclaimed Social Purpose Corporation one would think that would be a requirement.
I am very much looking forward to getting my Linux phone, the Pinephone, here in a few months. Only time will tell if Purism will deliver and the final quality of the device. I am rooting for them, but I won’t be giving any more money to them until I see a totally finished product.
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